Pseudo-public space in London
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
http://www.startribune.com/man-arrested-in-st-paul-skyway-su...
A father waiting to pick up his kids from day care sits in an ambiguously public-ish place. He refuses when an employee asks him to leave. Then the police arrive.
At that point he voluntarily gets up and starts walking away, but the cop follows him and continues pestering him to identify himself, etc.
It doesn't end well. I'm sure you can guess what he looks like.
It's an unpleasant story, but the ending seems OK.
Cops play the role of corporate lackey (like they do everywhere, in the USA and everywhere else), treat citizen badly, with probable significant racist component, and end up shooting him with a taser and arresting him. All bad so far.
But then he sues, and they settle for $100,000.00.
That's pretty much how that story should end.
Not really. The police decided to act like corporate lackeys and TAX PAYERS paid a $40,000 settlement to a person who was physically injured by their misconduct. There are several ways this story should end that are not that
1) the settlement should not cost the tax payers money
2) the cops, or at least the property owner, should pay the settlement
3) those officers should not be officers anymore AND they should be held to some level of personal responsibility for their actions
4) there should be consequences for the police brutally attacking someone who asserts their (legal in MN) right not to identify themselves to police officers
Second, if officers are forced to seek out indemnification on the open market these policies will be underwritten. Bad risks will be forced off the job through unaffordable policies. Whereas blanket indemnification by the taxpayer has no selection effect at all.
Maybe market magic would be more efficient, I doubt that in practice it would particularly show up.
I also wonder if cutting the above market clearing compensation would come for free, or if there are real reasons for it.
Edit to add: also, notice that you've addressed something different than what I said; you argue that it could cost less, not that the public would avoid paying.
Here's a law review article that reports the results of a national study on police officer indemnification: http://www.nyulawreview.org/sites/default/files/pdf/NYULawRe...
My study reveals that police officers are virtually always indemnified: During the study period, governments paid approximately 99.98% of the dollars that plaintiffs recovered in lawsuits alleging civil rights violations by law enforcement. Law enforcement officers in my study never satisfied a punitive damages award entered against them and almost never contributed anything to settlements or judgments—even when indemnification was prohibited by law or policy, and even when officers were disciplined, terminated, or prosecuted for their conduct.
In what percentage of cases would you guess that automobile insurance premiums rise where a driver is found liable for an incident and the insurance company is forced to pay out?
So sure, there's a good possibility that requiring police to carry individual liability insurance would lower costs. The public would still ultimately fund the premiums on that insurance.
What would happen if the cop responsible for the act could not cover the settlement money ?
The one affected by brutality would be doubly screwed.
The Police as a whole should be held accountable, and victims should be ensured compensation, they are by all accounts being brutalized by the state, and the state is run with taxpayers money.
Agreeing with the rest though.
Malpractice insurance?
This insures that the city who is guilty of hiring the miscreant ends up with the onerous duty of collection and the victim is compensated hastily.
What happens to normal mortals when they can't pay their debts. Are policemen really so much above the law that they don't have to pay their debts either?
Then you seize their property and sell it until there's enough to cover the settlement. Just like any other debtor. If they don't have enough property, you seize portions of their income.
Should a debt ordered by a court due to deliberately taking actions that harm another be treated differently than a debt occurred through a consensual transaction? If so, could the courts be given more power to seize resources (not just money) from the one owing the debt?
There are a lot of things that I would consider immoral to do to recover a debt that results from a consensual transactions that I wouldn't view as immoral to do to recover a debt incurred by criminal actions.
yes. that. that seems so obvious, but it also never seems to be the way things actually play out.
Officers Lori Hayne, Michael Johnson and Bruce Schmidt, who not only used excessive force but also perjured themselves in their official reports, paid not one penny of that settlement, faced no criminal charges, and didn't even have any adverse employment consequences.
So long as we refuse to hold police officers responsible for their actions they will continue to act as though they are above the law. Because they are.
But in a legitimate democracy, the citizenry cannot be "victimized" by "public servants that don't serve them".
If you hire some servants, and those servants don't serve you, and you don't get some new servants... whose fault is that?
But you're right on the essential point: the democratically elected government (== citizenry) involved here is paying an arguably reasonable price, but the individuals responsible probably are not.
so who's fault is that? usually not the victim. or at least the most direct victim, since obviously, society as a whole is hurt by this sort of thing (just not as much as the person who's wrongly harassed/injured/killed by the cops).
but maybe your point stands, because is that really a "legitimate democracy"?
Restitution, legally, covers monetary losses. It should not be taken to mean that all is well when the bills are paid. You can't pay away a black eye.
Maybe a better ending would move the needle at least slightly in favor of preventing this kind of thing in the future.
Among several things that ought to happen in an ideal world, perhaps we could give non-lawyers clarity on what is a public or private space: If a corporate tenant wants to regulate a private space this way, it has to clearly separate it from the public with some specification of doors, gates, etc. Otherwise, it will be considered public in a conflict like this one.
Homeless?
http://stmedia.stimg.co/08_473691_TASED082914_30709587.JPG?w...
'Guess' means not looking at the photo.
Until you said that I was picturing a white person. Maybe there is a natural tendency for people to picture themselves in the shoes of the story.
There is definitely a stereotype that police pick on African-americans more. But they also pick on a lot of all of people in general and there are way more white people in the USA, so I don't immediately assume that a person being picked on by police is black. There is also the stereotype that blacks are not attentive fathers, so the setting (picking a kid up at daycare), would have at least canceled out the police stereotype IMO. I'd be surprised if most people had the same assumption about skin color that you had.
Either way, I think calling attention to his skin color in the way you did is petty and rude.
But, why do you think it's rude?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/01/10/...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/27/polic...
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-cops-rac...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/black-people-...
Non preset African american fathers also stems from reality, just like the police stereotype. The Washington post source you gave actually did not dispute the absent fatherhood statistics - the article was about explaining why.
in the USA, 18% of non-Hispanic white fathers do not live with their children compared to 30% of hispanics, and 42% of blacks.
Rephrased from here: "Non-Hispanic white men aged 15–44 had the largest difference between those with coresidential children (37%) and those with noncoresidential children (8.2%). The difference was smallest among non-Hispanic black men, with 33% having coresidential children and 24% having noncoresidential children. Among Hispanic men, more than twice as many had coresidential children (44%) than had noncoresidential children (18%)."
Now to the mythology of the black male dereliction as dads: While it is true that black parents are less likely to marry before a child is born, it is not true that black fathers suffer a pathology of neglect. In fact, a C.D.C. report issued in December 2013 found that black fathers were the most involved with their children daily, on a number of measures, of any other group of fathers — and in many cases, that was among fathers who didn’t live with their children, as well as those who did.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/08/opinion/charles-blow-blac...
The one statistic it gave that disputes for more daily activity was for children under age 5, for certain activities, and only for black fathers that live with their children - not on the whole.
Very bad cherry picking and bad reporting.
This line was not in the reply I got by email (via HN Replies). I'm glad I caught it here because it illuminates a core problem with these conversations about policing and race.
I did not at all mean or knowingly suggest that the individual officers are bad people who thought bad things about this man because of his race -- i.e., these bad racist officers need to be removed and replaced with good non-racist officers, if any such unicorns exist.
But I understand why it might seem that way to family, friends and other defenders of police because so many critiques of policing do demonize them personally.
I wasn't trying to make this point, but good people acting in concert can easily end up behaving very badly, and even bring out the worst of human nature and its often false, reflexive assumptions about others. This ought to be particularly true for police, who confront the worst of humanity more than the rest of us.
You may disagree that black Americans are disproportionately victimized in this way by the police or that this played into what happened here, but that argument is not a personal one.
The gist is that you make a place so exposed and inhospitable, so uncomfortable that no-one will want to be there, thus ZERO crime! It is how to build in a natural panopticon to parks and buildings to maximize sight lines and exposure.
Most parks that we consider wonderful would have never been built under CPTED. They use all of the thought-crime rhetoric in their writings, Feng-Shui, community, etc except they do the opposite.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_prevention_through_envir...
The new order was "visually appealing" to the bureaucrats, with housing in one section, work in one section, government in the middle etc. A lot of vast open space made it so spontaneous markets & trading did not occur (due to enforced zoning and excessive sunlight instead of using shade from buildings), leading to a lower quality of life for its inhabitants.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/d... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bras%C3%ADlia
https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...
Although I can't come up with a clear bridge, I feel like the monobloc chair is also relevant to this discussion somehow:
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/bn5e4m/white-plastic-chai...
You don't have to ask why.
"insidious creep" implies that land that was previously public has become pseudo-public. But the examples cited seem to be land that was previously private has become pseudo-public. That just doesn't seem so dystopian to me.
The entire system of private property is terrible and I hope it will be abolished within my lifetime.
Would you be okay with having random people just entering your house, sleeping in your bed, using your toothbrush and then taking your computer on the way out?
Obvious straw-man, but my point is: There's got to be _some portion_ of the system of private property that you agree with on some level. You might for instance disagree with the way private property is distributed, or how access to it is made difficult for some groups, or how we value it more than public property. You might be in favor of more taxation, or of “fairer” taxation (whatever that actually entails would be hard for everyone to agree with) or of revamped eminent domain laws, but I find it really hard to believe that you'd hope for the entire system of private property to be abolished within your lifetime.
It's private land, the police have no role. People are being harassed by private security companies.
Why is that such an issue though? In the worst case, someone tells you it's private property and asks you to leave. Only if you refuse to leave do you commit an offence under English law.
And even that's only a civil, not criminal, offence.
I'm not a fan of Livingstone, but this is pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TuxOUGV6hE
Imagine someone who built a bunch of private parks all over a city that were open to the public, to the extent there was no demand for any public parks, but who decides to add a clause that no group activities related to sexual orientation (parades, protests, rallies, etc.) were allowed (of any orientation, so there was no discrimination issues).
Though, perhaps the blame still lies on the whole city for not keeping their public parks.
This is a lot better than companies fencing off huge swathes of land so you need to meander around their properties.
I really like recent development in my hometown (Warsaw) where you can walk around new buildings, sit on a bench and watch a fountain. Usually the local government doesn't have a budget to stick those facilities everywhere.
>free wi-fi and big screens showing summer sport, as well as activities like table tennis, climbing walls and outdoor gyms
I would even pay for a space like that, it sounds really nice.
The annual subscriptions generally aren't that high although they do tend to be linked to living in nearby properties (with some degree of flexibility).
The public library in my town sits on land that is part of a larger office park. The green space behind it is pseudo-public with walking/biking trails and ponds. I had to laugh at the rules posted opposite the library exit. Among them was a prohibition on the distribution of literature.
I grew up in an American suburb. There was basically zero commons. Most places you go to socialize (eg: the mall) are privately owned.
To quote the article: >it’s a very Atlanticist model, seen primarily in North America
Especially in terms of actual use. People might not even realize that some little set aside green space is semi public, whereas municipalities like to advertise their green spaces.
In this way, a park or two that you can't have a picnic in isn't all that alarming to me. Town squares used to be partially about places for bottom-up speech and marketing. In that world, silencing the riff-raff in squares had serious social consequences. These days, much of it seems digital.
The analogy is especially apt because if you think of web/net commons actually replaces free physical assembly (rather than augmenting it), then you can be convinced to give up your freedom of web/net assembly when whatever next new digital shift comes along. (E.g., not terribly concerned about my arms stuck in the tarpit because my head is connected directly to the VR meshnet...)
edit: clarification another edit: typo
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/15/100-best-nonfi...
For example, I've been disheartened by some of the parks I've visited in Baltimore. There's trash everywhere and sometimes I wonder if the city even knows the park exists.
They have trash cans in the dog park but no one was collecting them. I had to flag down the trashmen a few days ago and ask them what needed to happen for them to get it. They thought the dog park was a locked area.
A lot of the nicer streets in the more neglected areas are nice because residents go out and pick up the trash. I've given people shit who I've seen littering in my neighborhood, but at the same time, there aren't trash cans on every corner for them to use.
What especially irritates me are smokers throwing their rubbish everywhere. Why is practically every smoker a full on retard?
But at the end of the day, US citizen always seem to agree when asked if taxes are too high and the government is wasteful, and that opinion does not correlate with actual taxation or spending. The result is the decay of public property.
A nice comparison that I recently came across, illustrating the last point: The government spends just about half as much on IT per office worker compared to the private sector.
Drug dealing and use, drinking on the street, prostitues loitering, homeless people begging, women being catcalled and harassed, groups of youths congregating, littering, etc. are all commonplace in truly public spaces.
Many of these 'pseudo-public spaces' (think Granary Square, More London, Canary Wharf) are enormously popular with families and businesspeople precisely because they have security personnel who do a good job of tackling these things.
> Drug dealing and use
> prostitues loitering
> homeless people begging
> women being catcalled and harassed
> groups of youths congregating
> littering
> Many of these 'pseudo-public spaces' (think Granary
> Square, More London, Canary Wharf) are enormously popular
> with families and businesspeople precisely because they
> have security personnel who do a good job of tackling
> these things.
1. Reduce taxes / enforcement of taxes on large corporations
2. De-fund and generally decrease the quality of public service
3. Shift the burden of responsibility for providing said services onto said large corporations, who now provide a facsimile of the commons, minus inconvenient concepts like civil rights (right to assemble, speech, etc).
4. Use people's growing discontent with public services to argue for lower taxes. Go back to 1 and repeat.
This is then propped up by a "Broken Britain" narrative like your own, which is, forgive the bluntness, tabloid-fueled bullshit. Despite the the government's diligent efforts to undermine public services, London remains one of the cleanest and cities on the planet, and is certainly doing better than at any point in its history.
> Drug dealing and use
Literally every day. There's a man who sits on the next doorstep that I call 'Mr Subtle' as he is continuously 'reading' a newspaper. He has many friends who stop by for a quick chat. Then they smoke drugs that he has sold them.
> homeless people begging
Every day. Also stealing from Primark, sleeping in tents on the street, pretending to fall in front of traffic, pretending to read maps then asking for change, etc.
Certainly different parts of London have different homeless populations, but Camden and central London are not great.
I'm puzzled by what kind of psyche underlies a statement like this. I'm sorry to frame it in these terms, but honestly it seems... evil to me. Do you not understand that for many people, sleeping on the street is last remaining alternative to death? Take away the ability to sleep on the street, and you are killing people. If that is your intention, there are faster and more humane ways to do it.
Or do you believe that that were it not for the myriad comforts of the streets, the homeless would simply go back to paying off their mortgages or at least crashing on friends' sofas? Because if that's what you believe, you're simply wrong. Homelessness is a last resort. (And no, the government services which one ought to be able to avail oneself of are no longer always available. Particularly if you are a working-age male, it is often virtually impossible to prove to a social worker that you are not "voluntarily homeless", which then disqualifies you from receiving help.)
I'd like to believe that nobody participating in this discussion is that malicious or that ignorant. If you can show me a third way, I'd genuinely appreciate it.
That sounds like a horrible way to grow up, and yes people on the streets do die from exposure. Presumably they also get infections that can kill them, get beaten to death, get in to fights over who stole whose lighter, etc.
In the London that I live in, the homeless are there for all sorts of reasons - poverty, mental illness, addiction, running away from a bad situation, and so on - and not all of these people will die if they are not on the streets. They might be in all sorts of worse (to them) situations - low paid menial job, mental institute, rehab, back home with abusive parents.
Most of the time, they have little choice. Or the alternative choice is worse. Forcing them off the street would not just be morally wrong, it would be largely ineffective. Unless you privatise the whole world.
The main issue that I see with private spaces is that it shifts the responsibility of low-level policing of the space from the public to security guards. Obviously the first people to come up against this will be the homeless, as they are most likely to be breaking whatever hidden rules these spaces have.
Anyway, I don't have the time to discuss this. Good luck with the infrastructure software, it looks well made.
Yes, apologies for building too many assumptions; I guess this is a bit of a hot-trigger issue for me. I've seen people genuinely believe that if one makes life sufficiently difficult for the homeless, they'll just go away. In London this has lead to appalling incidents like [1]. I thought that was where you were coming; I see now that it wasn't. Sorry again!
In any case, I haven't got time to discuss this either -- gotta get back to work!
1: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/police-seize-poss...
I've lived in various areas, currently a bit further out in Zone 3, which means I should add rampant fly tipping and unlicensed/uninsured/abandoned cars to the list.
Eliminating these nuisances from an area is a costly business. It requires round the clock security, extensive CCTV monitoring, constant maintenance and adherence to the "broken windows" philosophy.
It is essentially a luxury, which private property owners bestow upon their 'pseudo-public' spaces. The public would be outraged if councils sought the funding, through taxes, to apply the same to truly public spaces.
Canary Wharf is busy in the week because it's full of skyscrapers. But I live just round the corner from it, and it's dead in the evenings or at weekends unless there's a special event going on, despite the relative safety. Other public areas in the surrounding neighbourhoods tend to be a lot busier. And actually, there's a large group of young drug dealers that regularly hang out in the west area of the Canary Wharf development.
That said, the private security forces do indeed do a good job of keeping these areas safe, and free of threatening homeless people and such. Still debatable whether or not that's a thing we should be solving by privatising public spaces...
On the whole it would probably be cheaper just to have kept the revenue and made a park.
For the price of developing that infamous fighter jet, how many parks could be upkept for how long?
Not a citizen, but paying taxes, and I think that maaaaybe some savings could be made by not having a military force that's five times bigger than the next three combined. Maybe 2x is enough?
That said, I do appreciate that pax americana has been very beneficial overall. So maybe it's not as wasteful as it sometimes sounds.
I'm not saying I prefer private, but I understand how they could gain popularity if the city isn't doing it's part to keep up it's own areas. Your IT stat doesn't surprise me, and is definitely a good point.
Round Falls, while not an official park, is an open area along the Jones Falls trail that runs through Baltimore that is in complete disarray (see http://thebaltimorechop.com/2012/06/26/round-falls/). Riverside Park was also pretty dirty when I visited, though it has good reviews online, so maybe I went on an off day.
I think they're great, because they're free and the alternative is paying $4 to sit in a Starbucks.
Of course when the weather is nice out you can go to a park.
Here's a site that lists the ones in NYC https://apops.mas.org/
(I don't have any first hand experience with these since I don't live near NYC)
This is confusing. Why is the Guardian trying to make private property sound scary and oppressive? Why should I expect that I can use someone else's property however I like and without permission from the owner?
> it also probably isn't a welfare-maximizing use of space.
Probably not, but that doesn't make the property any less private. Anyway, it hardly sounds like the corporations' terms are unreasonable, or significantly worse for "welfare" than those of a public park.
Often this is because the property would be owned by i.e. state/city, and that would provide citizens certain freedoms, such as freedom to gather on a public square.
If somebody would want to escort me from forest while I am foraging berries, or hiking or something, I would (according to our civil code, should) feel like my rights were infringed upon.
Based on this experience, I would like, if there is similar right given for things in cities that appear as public spaces, even if they are a privately owned parcels.
I understand that if you i.e. live in the US, this might see m weird, because the right of owner to restrict access to their land seems to be stronger there.
http://law.justia.com/constitution/us/amendment-01/54-quasi-...
It's much more complex than that. Every homeless person I've every offered to help has already rejected the systems in place to help them. Maybe they should have for various reasons. Reform and innovation in this kind of social work is sorely needed. But the whole story isn't that "society" just wants to give dirty people the boot.
The few genuine charities that offer help with no strings attached, and with sensitivity to potential unintended consequences, are frequently underfunded and subjected to frequent attacks by the powerful. For instance, the city might pass an ordinance criminalizing the act of giving away food gratis, if it was not prepared by trained personnel in a commercial kitchen with a current health inspection certificate, just to shut down a group that gives away sandwiches that were prepared in a church kitchen.
I don't think that "society" hates the homeless, but its self-appointed lords and masters sure seem to hate how they don't play the grossly unfair games that seem to have been set up just for them to lose. And there's my tinfoil hat, creeping back onto my head.
There is a vein of Puritan/Calvinist/Prosperity sadism running through the US. Adherents believe that those people are in the gutters because God is punishing their poor character with unfavorable circumstances. So in order to solve their financial problems, they must first accept that it is all 100% their own fault, and that random chance has no role in success or failure. People become rich only through hard work and public virtue, therefore poor people are all lazy degenerates. This twisted logic poisons public policy, because some rich people like to believe all their money makes them better than other people, and they spend a significant fraction of it on politics.
Those who genuinely believe in charity and "as you treat the least of you, so you treat me" may have greater numbers, but they have lesser funding, and therefore smaller political influence in the US. They can't seem to pass any public program to help people without someone amending it to punish the poor in some way for the sins made obvious by their financial condition. This leads to homeless rejecting official help.
From the outside, it just looks like institutional cruelty. I just cannot fathom the type of thinking that would spend thousands of dollars installing unnecessary armrests on park benches, just so that poor people derive less benefit from them. It is embarrassing for a supposedly advanced and modern society to have the human detritus of its public policies on display for all to see. But instead of fixing the broken policies, or accepting responsibility for those that were hurt, the evidence of brokenness is swept under the rug.
> There is a vein of Puritan/Calvinist/Prosperity sadism [...]
Where are you seeing this?
This is because I have overheard with my own ears a serious suggestion that it would be acceptable to vanish homeless people in the darkness of night and turn them into dog food, to be sold at a premium. Some people are just evil, delude themselves into thinking they are good, and they have far more money than a just world would ever allow them to touch. Maybe you don't hear that kind of thing often in places where the rich folks are mostly hippy-dippy liberals, but hearing it from even one pair of lips, without an iota of shame, is unsettling--like seeing one cockroach in your kitchen. What is being said when I'm not around to overhear it?
I also detect signs of it in written legislation and political discourse, particularly with regard to amending welfare programs to include work requirements or blanket consent to arbitrary searches by state officials. It's as though the default assumption is that recipients are out to cheat the system for a free ride, and spend all their benefits on illegal drugs.
I can't imagine how anyone could become so rotten and yet live, but from the anecdotal evidence, they do exist, and for bizarre and unfathomable reasons, their opinions count more than mine, even when we have the same number of votes to cast.
In the case of the personal anecdote, they had just finished replacing one $100k pedigreed lap dog--that had been run over--with another, when the d-bag refused to help his own nonagenarian mother with some of her bills, actually suggesting that she go on food stamps if she's having so much trouble.
Rich trash indeed.
Ironically, the unmitigated social problems that result from lacking basic social safety nets increase expenses many other places, including in healthcare, possibly by more than the programs would have cost. Instead of getting rehabilitation, an addict has to steal to feed their addiction, prompting more spending on police forces, plus fear and mistrust of others, and the addict uses a series of emergency room visits when things inevitably go badly.
You surely aren't saying it's as simple as "people with stuff hate the poor people".
It's literally everything else that they don't have.
Theres two ways to solve it better - the first is to ensure that the public is the owner, in which case we need to accept increased government spending on maintenance (the even worse alternative is no new open spaces because neither the public or private sectors will accept the ongoing cost).
The second is to ensure that the publics rights in privately owned places are unfettered. In which case there are liability issues to overcome legally (e.g. is the owner to blame if someone gets assaulted?) - the owners duty of care is a big reason for pushing undesirables out, even if that means the problems just move to proper public domain nearby. And there are also general maintenance issues - e.g. what happens when someone is destroying the high quality landscape or threatening to.
Your classic 'kids on skateboards' are a risk to both of the above (may cause wear on materials and also risk of accident) even if as a society we would normally accept this in a public place its hard for private owners to do so
Occasionally theres some other private policing arrangement too (eg the city hall london example above where they are trying to stop MPs being harranged as they walk in and out).
Its gets complex when you get into these issues. We also should seriously consider the disparity in quality and upkeep between these new spaces which often 'sell' a development but need expensive upkeep in perpetuity (even if privately owned this liability is usually passed from the original developer to some other body) and the reality of most public parks which are usually neglected, poorly designed and with much more basic materials. And along with this what kinds of public spaces we actually want and need as modern humans in cities
https://nycopendata.socrata.com/Housing-Development/Privatel...
(it's a MDB file of around 275K, so I imagine it just holds point data as opposed to full shapefiles)
One of the most well-known debates over the use of privately-owned public spaces was in 2011 when the Occupy Wall Street movement took over Zuccotti Park:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/20/opinion/zuccotti-park-and-...
The relevant part which describes how these spaces come with benefits to the developer, even as the developer is left to come up with "reasonable" rules:
> Among the better spaces is Zuccotti Park. The developer never received a floor-area bonus for the 26,000-square-foot park, although it did receive other valuable zoning concessions. The current owner, Brookfield Office Properties, voluntarily installed trees, seating, lighting and art over the last decade. (It also changed the space’s name from Liberty to Zuccotti Park, after John E. Zuccotti, one of its co-chairmen, creating a personal interest in the park’s quality.)
> Nevertheless, the events at Zuccotti Park highlight the continued inadequacy of the laws regarding privately owned public spaces. Other than the requirement that this space remain open 24 hours a day, the owners were left to promulgate their own rules; the only limit is that they be “reasonable.”
> Until last month, Brookfield’s rules barred skateboarding, in-line skating and bicycling, but said nothing about long-term occupation by any group. New rules, announced Oct. 13, permit passive recreation only and prohibit things like camping and lying down on the ground or benches if it interferes with others. The rules remain unenforced; no one is sure what will happen next.
An interesting map of regulations on actual public space in London: http://www.bannedinlondon.co.uk/map.html
There is the obvious concept of the potential for abuse encompassing all spaces so you could conceivably not ever be allowed to walk outside without potentially being discriminated against, or utilizing artwork to convey disturbing messages to try to influence public opinion, however, this can be the cases for government owned lands in all countries as well, and it is their private land, and I find the idea of not allowing people or organizations to own private land just because the public who is sitting in the park created to be used by them are noticing its not owned by the government, as an immediate abuse of government power to intervene on weather companies can buy land, and furthermore, choosing to take away their rights to do so because they are creating public spaces for everyone and making them nicer, and its annoys the public who benefits from it, as opposed to the perceived threat that one day it could be abused. Everything that is currently legal can be potentially abused, it just so happens in this case its not at all, and turning abandoned dumps and warehouses into public parks, green spaces, open musuems, and hosting events for the public on them.
in NYC, many of the parks when I worked there were previously total dumps and havens for crime, entire areas of manhattan have been turned around and they have the following effects
1. free urban green space the government cant afford 2. a clustering of small businesses around parks who pop up and do very well catering to lunches and outdoor cafes, 3. immense number of otherwise unrecognized groups being supported such as fashion shows, concerts and other events companies choose to support, public ice skate arenas 4. paying otherwise unrecognized artists millions to install their artwork in one of the most coveted places in Manhattan, etc 5. Making urban places desireable places to live and not just work, which is im pretty sure what the goals are for progressive humanity
Furthermore, I've never personally observed people being removed for looking scruffy, and I think in general you are removed for harrassing people, which police would do anyways.
In the current area I used to live in, there are 28 parks. 27 of them are complete dumps and noone takes care of them, particularly the young activists in town. There is one nice gated park own privately by a private community, who takes care of it, and you must live in the nieghborhood to have a key. Given the rest of the city is ridden with crime, its a safe spot for families to take their kids, or a women to read in the park without fear of beign a victim.
Regardless, despite the 27 other parks which the local government has asked hippie acitivists to come in and help clean etc, they are fixated on the idea of the one private park and trying to make it public, without understanding that the only reason its nice and noticeable is because its privately maintained, and the only reason people want to hang out there is because its safe, which is also because its privately maintained. Instead of taking the concepts that make the park desireable, and putting in the work to show that any of the other 27 complete dump parks could also become desireable and safe for gentrified communities to inhabit, and then use that as proof of concept that this park can be public and safe as well, and benefit more people, it turns out thats more effort than they are willing to put in. They only want to take the one nice park that is, without any plan on how to make the park not turn into the other 27 which are basically abandoned places people are sacred to go so, and as a female I would never go to alone. The government is too broke to maintain them.
We should promulgate a principle that until the left can demonstrate success with public assets, they should not get more of them.
Also, the council may not have the funds to properly maintain the open space if it was handed to them. It makes commercial sense for operators to do landscape work themselves if that is something that matters to them. People want retail, housing developments or high end office blocks to be attractive and well maintained.
It's explicitly transactional, in consideration for the property owner providing and maintaining the space, they get to build XYZ. And as the spaces are typically adjacent to their properties, they are motivated to keep them well maintained.
The alternative seems to be that the developer build smaller, or not build at all, and provide not public space.
Owners of privately-owned public spaces (POPS) need not delineate their property boundaries, or provide any kind of indication when someone may be crossing from a truly public space into a POPS. Owners of POPS may establish rules of acceptable conduct for their space, but are not required to publish them. The only way to discover what those rules are is by breaking one, at which time they may be enforced without prior warning, and with no due process or appeal. The rules may be changed at any time, for any reason, with no notice.
That system is so arbitrary and capricious, and so broken, that I can only conclude that it is entirely incompatible with liberal democracy. It is the very soul of plutocratic, pseudo-libertarian oligarchy.
How do you feel when you enter public (government) property, but they make available for you thousands of pages of by-laws that govern your behaviour? Is it oppressive?
Malls have no entry fee, but they often post their rules on their websites. I don't feel very oppressed by them, because I don't frequent malls much. I didn't even visit often back when they were popular. Places like Universal City Walk or Disney Springs in Orlando are actually like Hell for me, crowded, noisy, and commercial, and I am pretty uncomfortable with how the Reedy Creek Improvement District is like an independent fiefdom, and the acme of all tourist traps. It sometimes feels like you could be black-bagged and whisked away just for showing too much stress on your face and not having enough money in your pockets.
Yes, that's oppressive. And creepy. I don't like it when people look at me like I'm either an overflowing bag of cash to be drained or an unpleasant insect to be shooed away.
Rules for public land use are frequently organized by intent, and one does not need to read every last rule on every last page to enjoy any particular use. If you are just day-hiking, you don't need to read the parts about hunting or overnight camping. If you also want to camp or hunt, you can read those sections and not also the parts about cell tower sites or water rights. You also have the knowledge that if any rule for use of public land conflicts with your rights, it is void from the start, and if someone attempts to enforce it against you, you will likely eventually get some compensation.
But I have also read some of those thousands of pages of rules, and in some municipalities, yes, they are oppressive. In others, they are mostly reasonable. That also depends in part on the strictness and uniformity of enforcement. Policing for profit can make reasonable rules oppressive, and oppressive rules, laxly enforced, don't seem quite so bad when there is no real penalty for breaking them. In either case, the locals usually have some means by which to change the rules that they may disagree with, including loud and well-attended protest demonstrations.
The danger of POPS is that they replace some of the functions of truly public spaces, while leaving out one or more vital functions (like protest and free expression), then those public spaces wither and die, leaving people effectively unable to exercise the vital functions.
Given that e.g. large parts of the pedestrian routes along the Thames for example are private, there substantial stretches where you can't even stand and take pictures of the river where no part of said private property features in the picture, because the property owners have instructed their security to just blanket refuse all permission to take pictures.
(Source: Working in Canary Wharf on and off for 8 years)
You don't have public bid rules for government sales / purchases?
The places mentioned in the article (Granary Square, More London, Canary Wharf, etc.) were never public spaces.
They were predominately disused or abandoned industrial areas that have been developed to become vibrant and attractive places to live and work, creating entirely new 'public' spaces in the process.
They can just shrug and say "it's private land."
(I'm talking about cases where the gov sold public land to a private entity, not where a private entity just opened up their property)
On the other end of the spectrum, though, you will find plenty of examples of cultures - and nation states - where there is a historic assumption that the public good and/or liberty requires substantial restrictions on property rights, on the basis that land is a scarce resource and that while some property rights are necessary, or even desirable for the economic benefits it may bring, other such rights severely restricts the liberty of everyone else by depriving them of access, or actively harms society (e.g. most places place restrictions on carrying out various dangerous activities on your property without appropriate permissions).
For my part, the shock of moving to London (from Norway) where many parks have gates that are locked at night, was something I have still not quite gotten over - 17 years later. It feels oppressive, after being used to open spaces - most parks in Oslo have no gates or fences, and most of those that do have large gaps and any fencing is largely to block specific routes. Part of this is more public lands, part of it is a culture where fencing in semi-public private spaces is largely still seen as offensive restrictions on others freedom, helped by extensive rights of access ("freedom to roam") outside urban areas that gets people used to expect to be free to access open spaces.
To me the idea of liberty in a society with strict property rights makes a total mockery of liberty.
I believe that only through strong property protections can we experience liberty: when one's ownership in property is secure, then one may plan for the future. Conversely, when one's control of property is subject to the arbitrary whims of the state, then one may not plan for the future, and economic growth is not possible.
Many poor nations, for instance, have terrible land title systems, and the land may be taken from you by the local magistrate if you are not the proper color / religion / race or have not paid the proper bribes. Such is not a good environment in which to experience liberty. Sure, your empty field will always be open for the public to play football, but there will never be a factory in that field providing jobs and improving the general prosperity.
I won't attempt to tackle "the public good" or "actively harms society" here.
(I'm assuming that when you mention property that you mean "outside, unenclosed spaces." Do you also extend your view to the buildings on property? Offices? Private homes?)
In the US approximately 60% of households owned their home however of those most are owned by the bank. Only a steadily decreasing fraction are actually owned free and clear by those who reside there.
Most of the US is in fact divided among those who will be kicked out next month if they don't make their rent and a higher class of renter who will be kicked out several months later if he doesn't catch up his mortgage payments.
Both classes have little savings and may easily be a lost job away from homelessness.
Compare to the Nordic countries where e.g. it is actively illegal to e.g. fence in a privately owned forest most places, and barring restrictions on disturbing farm animals or ruining crops you can walk almost anywhere in rural areas, freely pick berries (outside of planted fields), mushrooms etc. even on private land, and even camp without needing to ask permission (but custom is to ask where it is convenient if you want to do so e.g. near a farm).
Norway (the others might too, but it's Norway I know about) also have strict legal restrictions on building near the sea and blocking access to beaches etc. to protect public access.
There is not a single country in the world today that offers you absolute property rights, because it actively harms those around you.
You are conflating the lack of absolute property rights with the other extreme.
> I won't attempt to tackle "the public good" or "actively harms society" here.
So in other words you constructed a strawman and didn't address the actual issue at all. The actual issue is the public good and the active harm to society and your neighbours that allowing anything near absolute property rights bring.
I know this system is broken - I firmly believe that if voting were able to make a difference, it would immediately be made illegal. That is the fight we must fight - that is the root cause of the problem.